Historiography

Historiography has two related definitions: the writing of history and the study of the history of historical writing. Both aspects are the subjects of fields offered by historians whose fields range in time from antiquity to the present and in place from the Mediterranean to the southeast Pacific. Students in these seminars examine techniques and assumptions employed in historical research, studying the
relationship between history and other scholarly disciplines as well as the uses of social science methodology and literary theory in the interpretation of historical sources. Specific topics vary with the individual offerings. They can include the nature of oral tradition, the reckoning of time, and the significance of historicism, Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and globalization for historical research. Students build their reading lists in consultation with their field advisors.

Comparative Ethnicity and Nationalism

This field prepares graduate students to analyze the historical formation of ethnic and national identities across time and space. Students will explore the ways in which race, ethnicity, and nation are shaped in conversation with gendered, class-based, political, and regional senses of self. Those focusing on this field will be expected to study relevant theoretical literatures emanating from various sub-fields of History. In addition, they may choose to concentrate on particular case studies related to their areas of interest.

Comparative Gender

The field introduces students to gender as category of historical analysis, examining the impact of feminist theory within the discipline of history. Students trace historiographical debates in women's and gender history and explore, through cross-cultural comparisons, how scholars have conceived their analysis of femininity and masculinity as well as the relationship between gender and categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Students will normally work with a primary field advisor and consult with a second faculty member to determine the comparative dimensions of their studies.

Comparative Colonialisms

This field approaches the comparative study of colonialisms through debates about the past by turning to the spatial and temporal constructions of modernity and what is sometimes called postmodernity. One manner in which this can happen is to draw cultural critics and historians of Europe, and the U.S., but also Latin America and Africa into comparative historical conversations about non-western studies. Continuing the dialogues with the social sciences that comparative studies have always entailed, this field seeks to integrate literary, historiographical, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories into these discussions by questioning the development of nations and identities, and the disciplinary constructions of modernity, ethnicity, gender, and culture.

For the purposes of this area of study, we will avoid positing a past time of tradition that has been overcome by modernity. “Tradition” and “modernity” both come into focus at the same time, and scholars can only recognize tradition in the light of modernity. What we must call “culture,” for lack of a better term, cannot be separated from the colonial moment and posited as an unchanging part of non-European civilization waiting for Europeans to uncover, interpret, document, or eventually reconstruct it. What social scientists call “tradition” developed within an atmosphere in which 19th century discourses of progress and science were percolating, both contributing and drawing from European, African, and Asian intellectual exchanges. This course will strive towards a re-envisioning of European histories that show the influence of Asian, African, and New World knowledges on the constitution of European mentalities.